by Jonathan Kay, MPP, Managing Partner, Health Market Experts & BioHealth Innovation, Inc. Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Welcome to Tactic 5 in our series of 7 Tactics to Optimize Launch Messaging 🚀 in health and life sciences 🧬. So far in our Optimizing Launch Messaging series, we’ve discussed topics such as the importance of data, the value of tailoring communications to your audience, and the benefit of making communication precise and purposeful. When messaging about a product launch, that included a reminder to focus on benefits and not only on features and functionality. But even the strongest message has limited potential if you can’t quantify its impact. That brings us to Tactic 5, Measuring Success.
Tactic 5: Measure Success
Feedback can be helpful in a variety of contexts. We look for feedback in the market, in a variety of forms of ROI.
In messaging, we look for message recall, impact, attribution.
We also want to know which parts of a message worked best, through which channels and messengers.
When designing your messages, you can find out a lot of that in advance. Think what you could do if you knew in advance of launching a business, a brand, or a campaign:
- Will the message work well?
- With which market segment or target audience?
- Will the message raise awareness?
- Change opinions?
- Motivate behavior?
- Why? How?
To ensure your messaging is targeting the right audience andmaking an impact, you need to measure its effectiveness.
In healthcare, that may mean testing with multiple stakeholders: physicians, payers, patients, among others.
🔑The key is to define success before you start testing.
At Health Market Experts, we recommend working back from your business need and desired outcome to determine which metrics will be most meaningful and practical.
For example,
- If the science behind a cellular treatment, like CAR-T, is critical to convey, but complex, then a good metric is clarity.
- If a gene therapy offers a functional cure, but may be perceived as “too good to be true,” then credibilitywould be a useful metric.
- When launching a novel advanced therapy, interim indicators of success may be useful, such as “likelihood to seek more information.”
Those metrics show different ways to assess attitudes and behavior.
Combining quantitative and qualitative feedback helps identify the messages that outperform for each audience, why and how those messages work.
Artificial intelligence can further enhance this process by rapidly synthesizing quantitative and qualitative feedback across stakeholders, uncovering patterns in message performance, and enabling faster, more precise iteration of launch communications. We talk more about AI for messaging in Tactic 7 down the road. But you still need to test with real stakeholders who will make the actual decisions that determine the success of your business or brand down the line.
In summary, metrics provide a feedback loop and let you design a roadmap for continuous improvement, ensuring your communications evolve as stakeholder needs and market dynamics change.
That’s why the strongest message has limited potential if you can’t quantify its impact. If you don’t know why it works, you can’t keep the best parts and improve the rest, even as the market changes and grows with you and your product.
If your organization is preparing to launch a new business or brand, connect with us (message me on LinkedIn) or visit https://www.healthmarketexperts.com/ to learn more about how we can help you with messaging and commercial strategy to set your business and brand on a path of success.
Written by a human. This post expands on content I previously wrote as a blog at Catalant and delivered in guest lectures at Rutgers Business School.
Visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-kay-healthcare/ to connect with Jon on LinkedIn.